Emotional self-awareness and self-regulation as essential tools to enhance Second Language Acquisition

Abstract

The study of emotions in the Second Language Acquisition (SLA) field is very recent and especially little attention has been devoted to how emotional self-awareness and self-regulation can positively impact second language (L2) learning. Thus, this work aims to report a questionnaire, designed to help L2 teachers to develop students’ emotional self-awareness, and to propose a set of educational practices for teachers to encourage and guide their students on how to self-regulate their emotions. To this end, regarding the first objective, we searched in the literature for similar questionnaires and adapted them in order to approach the four universal emotions: joy, sadness, anger and fear. Moreover, regarding the second objective, we looked for studies that investigated practices to improve students’ self-regulation and then we selected the ones that better fit the emotional perspective adopted in our study. Finally, ideas on how to implement the questionnaire and practices proposed here are put forward, together with final considerations and gaps to be addressed by future studies.